


Not the Needle, Nor the Thread

by steebadore



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Sex, Hurt/Comfort, Light on the Hurt, M/M, heavy on the comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-19 23:28:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14248107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steebadore/pseuds/steebadore
Summary: Bucky wakes to a noise.No, Bucky wakes tothenoise. It's not the hoarse shout of nightmares born of battlefields and blood that so often tear them both from sleep. No, this is smaller. Bitten off. Choked back. A furtive, strangled keen, nearly silent but pitched at a frequency that would raise Bucky from the dead.





	Not the Needle, Nor the Thread

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of self-indulgent sweet I used to procrastinate doing my Real Life Writing stuff. Not beta'd because sometimes I like to live dangerously with my purple comma splices and whatnot. 
> 
> Title is taken from Bon Iver's [Holocene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWcyIpul8OE) (I did mean it when I said self-indulgent...)

Bucky wakes to a noise.

No, Bucky wakes to _the_ noise. It's not the hoarse shout of nightmares born of battlefields and blood that so often tear them both from sleep. No, this is smaller. Bitten off. Choked back. A furtive, strangled keen, nearly silent but pitched at a frequency that would raise Bucky from the dead. He feels the sound like icy fingers searching for him in the quiet dark, slipping under his skin, sinking into his viscera. Clawing cold and vicious into his marrow. 

It is grief given voice; the sorrow of a loss so great even the eventual finding cannot heal it.

Bucky wonders, if Steve had made that noise on the bridge, would he have come back sooner? If Steve had been awake all those years between—in that liminal space when they'd been neither alive nor dead—would Bucky have woken in the cold, his body reaching for something he no longer had a name for?

He rolls over, finding Steve curled into himself, an open parenthesis of pain on the farthest edge of the bed. Because Steve Rogers may be a hundred years old, but he's still never learned how to reach out when he's in need. Bucky thinks sometimes maybe he was engineered for this specific purpose: to make Steve take what he can't ask for. Was he made in Steve's image, to be his inverse? Bone of his bone. Flesh of his flesh. 

Bucky reaches for Steve, grasping his shoulder and rolling him over onto his back, pushing their bodies together so they are skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat. "Hey, hey baby," Bucky says softly, framing Steve's face with his hands. "Can you look at me, Stevie?" 

Steve's eyes are screwed up tight, his body rigid beneath him, clenched against the comfort Bucky offers, not yet able to trust that it's real. Bucky presses down, letting Steve feel the weight of him, the sharp edges of his bones, the cool metal of his arm, the humidity of Bucky's breath on his neck.

_Real, real, real._

"Okay, sweetheart, okay," Bucky whispers, running his thumbs over Steve's brow, his wet eyelids, down that bumpy, ungainly nose--the only physical evidence that Steve is a flawed human and not a figure cut from marble. 

If you asked Bucky what he loved most about Steve, he might say something like his goddamn earnest heart, or those too beautiful-for-spacious-skies eyes, but really it was this: the bump on Steve's nose, put there by Bucky himself, age eleven. Selfish, maybe, but Bucky never pretended to be otherwise these days. He doesn't know why the serum didn't fix that--Bucky likes to think it couldn't. Steve always said how it didn't change anything, just amplified what he already had, and what he had was Bucky's mark on him, down to the bone. This one's mine, it said. You cannot have him. Not the whole of him. 

War couldn't have him. The ice couldn't have him. And this suffocating grief Steve won't acknowledge can't have him either. 

Bucky runs his lips over Steve's clavicle, scraping teeth against the thin skin stretched over the bone, making Steve shudder beneath him. He sucks a mark into the pale, perfect skin of Steve's neck, just over his throbbing pulse. Another mark, another reminder. _I'm here. I'm real. I've got you._

"You've been holding it together for so long, Stevie," Bucky whispers into his skin. "Had to be so strong, for your Ma, for the Howlies, for your team. For me. You forgot how to let go, didn't you?" He mouths along Steve's jaw, his chin, pressing his lips to the corner of his trembling mouth. "But I'm here now, baby. I've got you. Let it go, sweetheart. Give it up to me, let me carry it for you now."

"Bucky." That broken, needy sound forms his name, over and over as Steve's eyes open and his arms come around him, clutching and desperate. 

"I'm here, baby," Bucky says, kissing his red, wet mouth, swallowing down those wounded noises, taking them onto his tongue like communion. The transubstantiation of grief. 

He kisses back down Steve's neck, across his shoulders, along that perfect line bisecting his chest and abdomen. He licks along the muscled furrow of Steve's hip, pausing to suck a mark over his hip bone, smiling into his skin when Steve groans and arches under him. _Feel me, feel me, feel me_ , he thinks, pressing his fingers harder into Steve's waist, biting bruises into the taut, trembling skin of his stomach. 

He takes Steve's half-hard cock in his mouth, letting the warm weight of it sit heavy on his tongue, sighing into the slow stretch of his lips as Steve thickens inside him. Steve's hand comes to rest on Bucky's head, his fingers threading through Bucky's hair and it's gentle, passive, but still Bucky feels held down, held in place. His place. He thinks maybe he'd like to sit like this all day sometime. Just breathing and holding Steve warm and safe inside him. Quiet and reverent, with the taste and the smell and the silky weight of Steve in his mouth like an anchor. 

_Real, real, real._

Sometimes Bucky needs that reminder too. What a pair they make: mirrored images of the same pain; cause and effect made flesh. 

He swallows around Steve and loses himself to the familiar rhythm of it. Steve's hand cupping the back of his head, Steve's hand curled around the nape of his neck. Steve's thighs under his chest, clenching with every downstroke. Steve's trembling stomach under his hands, expanding with every inhalation. Steve's voice in his ears, breathless now, but not so wounded. Bucky's name in his mouth. 

"Buck," Steve rasps, his hands tightening in his hair. "Too far." He tugs gently, urging Bucky up. "Closer." He pulls Bucky up his body, slotting their mouths together, sloppy, desperate.

"I'm right here," Bucky murmurs against his lips, sliding his hands under Steve's back to hold him closer, press them tighter, wishing he could crawl inside Steve's skin, make a home for himself behind Steve's ribs. "I got you." 

Steve presses his face into Bucky's neck, wraps thick arms around his shoulders, his hips, and it's almost as good. Bucky feels swallowed up in Steve, and tightens his own grip, hoping Steve feels the same. They stay that way for long minutes, breathing into each other's skin, pulse beating against pulse. 

_Real, real, real._

Steve slides a hand across Bucky's hip, cupping the curve of his ass and pressing two fingers against his hole. "Can you…?"

The gentle touch makes Bucky moan, an ache flaring to life inside him though he is still slick and open from having Steve mere hours ago. "Yeah," he whispers, pressing a kiss to the curve of Steve's jaw and sitting up to reach for the bottle of slick still sitting on the bedside table. 

Steve shifts beneath him, wrapping his arm around Bucky's hips to keep him in place as he moves to sit up against the headboard. He presses his face to Bucky's chest while Bucky slicks himself and then Steve with practiced, cursory movements, Steve's mouth moving soundlessly against him, his fingers restless and rough as they map every inch of Bucky's skin as though seeking tangible proof. 

Bucky runs his hands through Steve's hair, tugging gently on the ends to bring his head up. "You with me, sweetheart?" he asks, positioning himself over Steve. He sinks down slowly, forcing his eyes to stay open and on Steve's through the long blissful stretch. 

"Bucky," Steve breathes out when Bucky settles onto his lap. 

Bucky leans forward, rolling his hips and brushing his mouth against Steve's to capture his gasp. "I've got you," he murmurs, and does it again, wrapping his arms around Steve's shoulders and sinking into his mouth, moving his hips slowly, letting them both feel every inch.

"Yeah," Steve moans, hands dragging up and down Bucky's back, calloused palms catching deliciously on his sensitive skin, gone slick with sweat. His fingers flex against Bucky's hips, sliding lower to press into his ass, not to guide but to feel. He brings up his knees, cradling Bucky closer, moving them together in one slow, sinuous roll. 

"God, Steve," Bucky moans, the angle pushing Steve deeper, making Bucky feel as though he's splayed across him, stretched wide open. Steve's cock is dragging against that spot inside him with every movement now, making sparks flare with every thrust. Steve's fingers slide lower, finding where they're joined and slotting on either side of his cock, rubbing softly at Bucky's slick hole and feeling himself slide in and out. The touch makes every sensation more intense, makes Bucky aware of how sensitive he is, how good every point of contact feels. 

Almost as one, their breaths catch and their bodies tremble and Bucky feels the tell-tale clutch in his belly that tells him he's about to come, and knows Steve's not far behind him. "That's it, sweetheart," he manages to gasp. "You feel me?"

"Wanna feel you come, Buck," Steve says, gripping Bucky's hip and pressing him down onto his cock, thrusting deep. "Wanna feel you come on me."

 _There you are_ , Bucky thinks, his eyes finding Steve's--dark and intent and _present_ now, in a way they hadn't been before. _There you are_. 

"Steve," he says on a broken breath as he comes apart, shaking and sighing into his mouth as he feels Steve follow. 

Steve rolls them over when Bucky begins to shiver, pulling the blanket over their shoulders and cuddling him close. "You okay?" Bucky asks quietly.

"Yeah," Steve whispers, pressing a kiss into Bucky's shoulder. "I'm sorry for waking you."

Bucky resists the twin urges to roll his eyes and punch his face. "You got nothing to be sorry about, Steve," he says instead, his voice quiet as Steve's, like they both know something about this moment is fragile, like it'll break apart if they aren't careful. "Except maybe not waking me up on purpose." 

Steve frowns but Bucky cuts him off. "If you're in pain, I want to know about it. If you need something that I'm not giving you, you gotta ask for it, baby." He reaches up, running his hand through Steve's hair and cupping his jaw. "You've been taking care of me for so long. It's okay to let me have a turn now."

Steve closes his eyes, swallowing hard. "I don't know what to ask for. Don't know what I need. I've got everything--I've got you. I don't know why it still hurts. It's stupid."

"Nothing that you feel is stupid, your emotions are val--hey," Bucky says, flicking Steve on the nose when he sees his mouth twist derisively. "Yeah, I'm using therapy-speak on you, pal. And news flash: it helps. You could do with some of your own. I'm not the only one who crawled through shit to get here, Rogers."

Steve sighs, rolling over onto his back. "Yeah, maybe."

Bucky resists the urge to fist pump at the small victory. He'll get him there. Instead he curls up beside Steve, leaning over to press a kiss to his surly mouth, the tip of his nose, that ugly, obvious bump. 

"Still feeling smug about that, I see," Steve says, a small smile curling the edges of his lips. 

"‘til the day I die," Bucky confirms, tapping it lightly with his finger. "Like I signed the goddamn painting."

Steve snorts. "Yeah, in my blood."

"Still my mark on you," Bucky says, laying his head on Steve's chest. "Remind you who you belong to every time you look in the mirror."

"Don't need the reminder, Buck," Steve says, wrapping his arms around Bucky and snuggling more deeply into the blankets. 

Bucky presses closer, wrapping himself around Steve so he can feel the heavy warm weight of his body, see the rise and fall of his chest under his hand, hear the slow, even beat of his heart under his ear. _Real_ , he thinks, drifting off to sleep. _This is real._

**Author's Note:**

> [steebadore.tumblr.com](https://steebadore.tumblr.com/)


End file.
